Evangelicalism in America

"Eminently readable, Randall Balmer’s Evangelicalism in America offers a concise historical capsule of axial episodes in the nation’s religious and political history from the founding onward. Deeply drawn to the evangelical tradition in which he was raised, Balmer is also among its most discerning critics—a prophet who draws his direst warnings against today’s Religious Right from his learned familiarity with the country’s Protestant past. Seen from that long historical view—from Roger Williams to Martin Luther King Jr.—the rightwing mobilization of evangelicalism over the last forty-plus years is laden with ironies and paradoxes that Balmer fearlessly unpacks."

—Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, Washington University in St. Louis

"Randall Balmer is both one of our nation's best historians of American evangelicalism and an important advocate for the recovery of a long and profound tradition of progressive, even radical, social-justice and human-dignity evangelicalism. This book offers vintage Balmer on both fronts."

—David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics, Mercer University

"In this book Randall Balmer takes us on a lively journey through the past three centuries of American evangelicalism. In the process, and as he has been doing for decades, Balmer winsomely and compellingly calls on evangelicals to remember their storied history as ‘agents for change’ in behalf of ‘those on the margins.’"

—William Vance Trollinger, Jr., co-author of Righting America at the Creation Museum

As a self-acknowledged sympathizer with classical Evangelicalism, Balmer laments its fading into a mere shadow of its founding idealism. His choice of final essay indicates that he holds little hope for the future of a religion that uses political power as its main form of self-identity in a land founded on religious freedom.

-- Reading Religion

A quick primer for how Evangelicalism became what it is today.

-- Reading Religion

For directors of parish discussion groups, professors teaching undergraduates about American religion looking for an accessible text, or pastors appointed to an ecumenical commission, I’d run out and buy this book.

-- Theological Studies

A vital contribution to the study of a movement which itself has made such a vital contribution to the very soul of the United States.

-- Fides Et Historia

Balmer writes in clear, engaging prose, providing lively and concise portraits of movements and individuals from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

-- Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

An entertaining and provocative book by a senior scholar of American evangelicalism.

-- Bibliotheca Sacra